Generating Sentiment Lexicons for German Twitter

Uladzimir Sidarenka, Manfred Stede


Abstract
Despite a substantial progress made in developing new sentiment lexicon generation (SLG) methods for English, the task of transferring these approaches to other languages and domains in a sound way still remains open. In this paper, we contribute to the solution of this problem by systematically comparing semi-automatic translations of common English polarity lists with the results of the original automatic SLG algorithms, which were applied directly to German data. We evaluate these lexicons on a corpus of 7,992 manually annotated tweets. In addition to that, we also collate the results of dictionary- and corpus-based SLG methods in order to find out which of these paradigms is better suited for the inherently noisy domain of social media. Our experiments show that semi-automatic translations notably outperform automatic systems (reaching a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.589), and that dictionary-based techniques produce much better polarity lists as compared to corpus-based approaches (whose best F1-scores run up to 0.479 and 0.419 respectively) even for the non-standard Twitter genre.
Anthology ID:
W16-4309
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of People’s Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media (PEOPLES)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Malvina Nissim, Viviana Patti, Barbara Plank
Venue:
PEOPLES
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
80–90
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4309
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Uladzimir Sidarenka and Manfred Stede. 2016. Generating Sentiment Lexicons for German Twitter. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of People’s Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media (PEOPLES), pages 80–90, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Sentiment Lexicons for German Twitter (Sidarenka & Stede, PEOPLES 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4309.pdf
Code
 WladimirSidorenko/SentiLex